Edie (17 page)

I remember that summer I had a poisonous conversation with Edie. We were sitting in the living room at the ranch. She asked me if I didn’t think she was the most beautiful one in the family. I was an outsider—you have to remember that this was a family in which I was a monster—and Edie was asking for fealty, for tribute. I said, “No!” I didn’t say that just out of meanness. Actually, I thought Pamela was very handsome, with the most beautiful legs, the most talented, and the most special. I said so. That was the only time I remember talking to Edie; I disliked her heartily.

SARA THOMAS
 Duke Sedgwick adored Edie. He just couldn’t take his eyes off her. He said she was so delicious. She was the only one of the Sedgwicks I ever saw who fixed herself up. She came into the living room before supper with just a small amount of make-up on and she was absolutely devastating. Duke referred to her as “my little chorine,” which I thought charming since the word is so antique.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 Edie was allowed to use Fuzzy’s car, which nobody else was. Fancy that. Mercedes 190-SL. Pretty glamorous. Edie liked to be glamorous, she did I She always did, but it was a dress-up
time being glamorous, and “Let’s have a giggle. Turn on the radio and pass everybody on 101.” That’s what we did. With our sunglasses on, feeling like two movie stars. Shit, it was just fun for us. And then we’d get the giggles over some twerp who’d follow us. All it was was just pure fun and letting off steam. Sizzling along the highway with the music blaring and with our fancy scarves over our hair and our big sunglasses on our faces. Oh, shit, we had fun!! It was just fun, it was dress-up time in the car with the music, but there was the fine line, a razor line, too, between our fun and hysterics. Because, coming back from Anderson’s Pea Soup diner, I think we screamed all the way home. That’s a little exaggerated for just having fun. Somewhere along the line—somewhere, somehow—I seem to remember that the screaming turned into tears. It wasn’t quite as much fun as it was supposed to be.

Edie had a streak of
Wuthering Heights
in her. She loved violent weather. We went through a thunderstorm on horseback up in the high mountains—I mean, as high up as you can get on the ranch. A whopping thunderstorm. I was so goddamn scared, I didn’t want to go home alone. I ran my horse all the way home. Jesus, I galloped all the way from the top of the ranch down to the barns. Edie wanted me to leave her alone up there.

When it was a beautiful night, we’d disappear into the hills and sing “Dream, Dream, Dream.” We used to sing our heads off when we went riding. It was an absolute escape from the world we were living in. In the evening we’d ride into that sunset I We’d ride along the topmost hills of the ranch and
stare
at the sunset. I mean, we just never took our eyes off that sunset changing. Then it got to be dark, and we were both scared of the dark.

Oncoming night was accompanied always by coyote calls, yowls. Have you ever heard a coyote? Yowls into darkness. That was savagery.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 I always thought Edie wanted to escape on her horse, but she couldn’t get off the ranch. She was penned in. Usually it started with a battle with my father. She always felt that he would come and get her. So she could only run away on the ranch. She would just disappear into the mountains with her horse, Chub, and you never knew where she was. Then she’d come back mellowed out.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 My parents didn’t know what to do with Edie. They were not going to send her back to St. Timothy’s, so they decided to take her to Austria. If things didn’t go right, Europe always was the
solution. The idea was to send her to stay with a noble family in Vienna.

But when they arrived, there was a terrible blow-up in the hotel room. My father became convinced that Edie was really sick. My mother had tried to conceal her eating habits from him until then. He realized that Edie wasn’t able to function; she couldn’t even cross the street by herself. My father must have gotten one good look at what the hell was going on and said, “No, this is crazy.” He became frightened and even threatened to pull the whole family down around my mother’s ears if she didn’t send Edie to a mental hospital. Imagine the ambivalence of my father—such a destructive, negative force—trying to get Edie helped. Actually, he was doing the right thing for the wrong reason. He was trying to get rid of Edie, pull her away from my mother, who was obsessed with her.

So my mother and Edie came right back from Austria. I think they were only there for about forty-eight hours. I saw them at my grandmother’s apartment on Park Avenue. It was a strange meeting. My grandmother was lying senile in her bedroom. Edie seemed superficially sane. Rather than anxious or disturbed, she seemed angry and resigned.

But then at lunch I saw her
heap
her plate and eat in that bizarre way that anorectics do, picking and wolfing . . . and then she would get up and disappear.

When I heard what the choices were—that unless Edie went to the mental hospital at Silver HI’ll where Minty had been, my father would leave the family. I said to my mother, “You’re in a situation where you have to choose between your husband and your children.”

She said, “Oh, no, there’s no question of leaving my husband. I couldn’t.”

JONATHAN SEPGWICK
 Of course, Mummy knew that Edie wasn’t the problem—it was Fuzzy who should have been in an institution. He was just about at the edge of a breakdown: shaky, nervous, running around like a guy with his balls cut off. I’d come from the Army in Germany to see him in London. He was in an absolute panic that Mummy had left him. She had stood up to him. She’d said, “Goodbye, I’m leaving. I’m taking this child with me.” He stayed in London for a week and a half, praying that she’d heed his instructions to put Edie in an institution. That’s when Mummy gave in; she could sense he was folding. She had an intuition that covered everybody.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 When Edie was sent away, it affected my mother profoundly. She cried. The only times I had ever heard her cry before was when she fired governesses. I heard her crying behind the sliding doors of the library at my grandmother’s apartment. They were never closed, but my mother pulled them together, and I heard her in there. I said to her through the doors, “You shouldn’t shut yourself off when you’re suffering.” She replied that she always liked to be in control of her emotions.

My mother put Edie in Silver HI’ll the fall of 1962 as my father had demanded. I would go to visit her. She worked in the shop at the hospital a little bit, but it seemed absolutely pathetic. She had an awful beehive hairdo. She looked like a drugstore attendant.

Silver HI’ll was quite lax. Edie made good use of the facilities, particularly the OT, occupational therapy. She made lots of objects—a cheeseboard over there on the table. The design’s faded, but there were five mice on it, very deftly drawn. Edie did pretty much what she wanted at Silver HI’ll and she could leave whenever she wished. Phyllis La Farge’s mother’s house was nearby—Edie’s godmother, I believe—and Edie probably went there. Mrs. La Farge was a solitary woman who fed her big Labrador dogs from her plate with her own fork or spoon. She said that their mouths were cleaner than ours.

JOHN ANTHONY WALKER
 Edie said that she was the only person at Silver HI’ll they could never figure out what was wrong with. She was very pleased with that. She felt she could outthink them. She wanted to get away, of course.

PRISCILLA EVANS
 Most of the people at Silver HI’ll were middle-aged, there to dry out or get over divorces. There was this old Dr. Terhune who was the head of the place and gave these dumb lectures; he’d written this book of essays and he’d read them to us once a week. About the only other contact Edie had besides myself was with a girl named Virginia who stayed there almost as long as Edie did. They had sort of a rivalry as to who had been there the longest and who was the sickest.

VIRGINIA DAVIS
 Silver HI’ll was very swish in my time. Some rich lady kept donating her Hitchcock furniture . . . originals. Every year she would redo her house and Silver HI’ll would get all this fine furniture.
Edie was in the main house. Everyone had private rooms; I think it was something like a thousand dollars a month to stay there, not including psychiatric care. In those days they had no maximum-security facilities and they claimed not to take anyone who was seriously disturbed—no psychotics or schizophrenics or alcoholics. Of course, half the younger crowd there—the people in their forties—were alcoholics, and they could wander down to the Silvermine Tavern any time they wanted and get crocked. I mean, who was to stop them?

Silver HI’ll was like a country club when Edie and I were there. We were served at dinner, all very proper, from the left, and dinner attire was required. We goofed off and had a grand time. After lunch Edie and I would go into town and she would spend thousands of dollars charging stuff. I mean, thousands! Maybe not at one shot, but a few hundred one day and then a few hundred the next. If you stayed at Silver Hill, the New Canaan merchants would extend you unlimited credit. Edie would buy shoes and clothes and art books, the expensive ones, like the Leonardo da Vinci book for fifty bucks. But she never felt constrained. She acted as if it didn’t matter in the slightest.

She had a peaches-and-white complexion, those dark eyes, and dark hair. She used this very pale make-up to accentuate this contrast. I felt all thumbs by comparison with her. She was a very dominant personality. We used to have conversations . . . philosophical discussions, and on this one occasion we decided we were so alike in our heart of hearts that we shared the same soul I There was nothing sexual or anything like “that involved, just crazy girls the same age who were together in this messy scene. Edie had the notion that she wanted control over the soul we shared, so one afternoon in my room she took it. For some reason her nurse wasn’t around. I can remember going that evening, about four or five, terribly upset, to see our doctor. Both Edie and I had him. I was crying because Edie had taken my soul and I was totally under her control, which put me in limbo all by myself . . . soulless. I’d let Edie have it because she deserved it, being better or prettier or something, and Edie apparently agreed with me.

My doctor was at high tea . . . well, not really high, but his family always had cookies and real cream for tea. He told me it was all a lot of nonsense. He said, “Poppycock. You’re being silly. You’ve got your own soul and she’s got her own, and they’re distinct.”

Edie used to say that she wasn’t ill, she was only there because her father wanted to get rid of her. She complained a lot about her family. Of course, I did, too. That was the big thing, hate your family, it was all their fault. To hear Edie talk, her family was all wild and woolly out there in California. She never spoke much about her mother. I remember being so surprised to hear a friend of mine describe Edie’s mother as being this reasonable and sedate lady.

Edie at Silver Hill, 1962